Some common problems with displaying routes created from street data, such as bus routes, include:

Routes may overlap themselves, such as when a route takes the same road in opposite directions

Routes may overlap other routes that take the same street.

Routes are often overly detailed, or "noisy", owing to their derivation from street data.

Indicating a route's direction unambiguously without overloading it with arrows can be a challenge.

What are some techniques for dealing with these issues in order to create a practical and usable route map, such as this Manhattan bus routes map? Do you know of any such public transport maps that were produced by automatic techniques rather than manual illustration/digitization?

Specifically I am using ArcGIS 10, but solutions involving other software are welcome as well.

One technique I have had some success with for dealing with 1) is using ArcMap's cartographic line symbols with a negative offset -- assuming the lines are oriented in the direction of travel, this will offset the lines such that the right and left-hand sides are distinct and oriented as you would expect (at least for right-hand traffic countries, for left-hand traffic countries one would use a positive offset). However the result tends to be a bit wonky around turns, interchanges and and U-turns, and is inflexible when dealing with multiple routes.

Another possibility that I am not very familiar with but which seems promising is cartographic representations -- however, I have not had much luck in finding examples of using representations for transportation maps and whether it might fit the bill.

Haven't seen that before so no! (+1) I didn't see any screenshots or mention of it integrating with a map though -- can it be configured to act as a normal layer in a map document, or is it always in a separate non-spatial view?
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blah238Jun 20 '12 at 9:16

That's great, thanks (and almost frighteningly close to what I was looking for!). I am of course interested to see what other options there are while I look into this one so I'll wait for other responses before accepting an answer.
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blah238Jun 20 '12 at 9:48

I don't think I would recommend this at the start (more as a last resort for simplicity), but I have seen many subway maps actually manipulate the lines to be more orderly. Here is an example from the visual.ly blog depicting U.S. highways. I am pretty sure there are many more floating around though.

This mainly addresses your point #3, but it helps to partially solve the other problems as well. When the lines are less tortuous it is easier to develop symbology to distinguish between the lines and over-plotting is easier to solve by off-setting symbols.

In terms of time to make they look like alot of work though. Also it is painful to suggest distorting geography to make a nice looking map, but there are some nice examples floating around. I will try to find some more examples and post them back here.

Great subway style map, can we reach this result using Arcgis Schematics ?
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geogeekJun 20 '12 at 13:57

Thanks for the how to , this is really useful :)
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geogeekJun 20 '12 at 13:59

1

@geogeek, I suspect most of the examples were constructed in other vector graphics editing programs. While off-the-cuff the ArcGIS Schematics seems like it will get you part of the way, it doesn't look like it has the ability to manipulate geometries at will like you can in a vector graphic program like Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator. I don't know for sure though, I have never used the tool.
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Andy WJun 20 '12 at 14:04

"This paper describes an automatic mechanism for drawing metro maps.
We apply multicriteria optimization to find effective placement of
stations with a good line layout and to label the map unambiguously. A
number of metrics are defined, which are used in a weighted sum to
find a fitness value for a layout of the map. A hill climbing
optimizer is used to reduce the fitness value, and find improved map
layouts. To avoid local minima, we apply clustering techniques to the
map — the hill climber moves both stations and clusters when finding
improved layouts. We show the method applied to a number of metro
maps, and describe an empirical study that provides some quantitative
evidence that automatically-drawn metro maps can help users to find
routes more efficiently than either published maps or undistorted
maps. Moreover, we found that, in these cases, study subjects
indicate a preference for automatically-drawn maps over the
alternatives."

Below is autogenerated map of Sydney transit from Stott's thesis:

This blog post by Chris Mueller providers a high level summary of Stott et al.

Transitive.js - A tool for generating dynamic stylized transit maps that are easy to understand from transit data. Read more in this blog post. Here's the output of Transitive:

In this chapter, we give an overview of the main types of geometric
networks that are being visualized in an automated fashion, using
node-link diagrams. For each network type, we consider the
application-dependent aesthetic constraints. We group the network
types according to the graph class to which they belong: paths
(simplified, schematized and generalized in Section 23.2), matchings
(used in boundary labeling in Section 23.3), trees (as in flow maps;
see Section 23.4), (near-) plane graphs (such as street or metro maps;
see Section 23.5), and other graphs (such as timetable graphs, the
Internet multicast backbone, or social networks; see Section 23.6).

Unfolding - a library to create interactive maps and geovisualizations. To my understanding, though, this only visualizes preexisting data, and doesn't do any generalization for routes.